Processor upgrades for Quanta Windmill

I’ve just installed a 1050ti in one of the nodes of my Quanta windmill. I was able to get 59 fps at 1080p on the Tomb Raider benchmarks and 90+ fps at 720p. I will write up more on the performance of this card once I get cuda installed and running on it. I was quite surprised that a barebones server like the quanta windmill could handle a 1050ti. Even though the 1050ti has no external power requirements and draws everything it needs from the pcie, it still pulls 75w which was more than I expected the windmill to handle.

Now that I know this works, I don’t need to spend money on a new computer to support my 1050ti. I am considering spending this money on a faster set of processors to put in this machine. To determine if the upgrade is worth it, I’m compiling some stats about the processors to help me decide.

The processors:

I’m looking at upgrading from dual e5-2650’s to e5-2680 or e5-2680v2. I believe this quanta board will support e5v2 chips per this forum. However, there is still a level of uncertainty there.

E5-2650 (current processors):

• 8 core, 16 thread.
• Base frequency of 2 GHz
• I’ve observed all core turbos of 2.5 GHz during hpl benchmarking

E5-2680:

• 8 core, 16 thread
• Base frequency of 2.7 GHz
• All core turbo reported: 3.1 GHz

E5-2680v2:

• 10 core, 20 thread
• Base frequency of 2.8 GHz
• All core turbo reported: 3.1 GHz

Theoretical Peak floating point performance

e5-2650 (current):

Single precision: 640

• (8x2x2.5x16)
• All core turbo observed during linpack is 2.5 GHz
• 16 instructions per cycle

Double precision: 320

• 8 instructions per cycle

Observed double precision: 260.5787 GFLOPS

e5-2680

e5-2680: theoretical single precision = 8 x 2 x 3.1 x 16 = 793.6 GFLOPS

double precision = 8 x 2 x 3.1 x 8 = 396.8 GFLOPS

e5-2680v2: 10x2x3.1x16 = 992

10x2x3.1x8 = 496